For much of the evening, the streets felt calmer than usual for Halloween in the Castro.
"This is absolutely dead," San Francisco Police Sergeant Chuck Limbert remarked as he and Castro Special Patrol Officer Jane Warner walked down a wide-open 18th Street around 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 31. Shortly thereafter, Limbert calmly decided to handcuff an apparently intoxicated man on Market Street whose ironically appropriate prison costume drew laughter and whose early arrest left his friends standing open-mouthed and humbled.
Around 9 p.m., District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty propped himself up on a metal barricade and surveyed the enormous crowd walking up Market Street from downtown. Dufty, along with SFPD officers and neighborhood merchants and residents, proceeded to walk the main and side streets all night. The mood was cautiously optimistic, Dufty's camp said, adding that the real test would come at about closing time, scheduled early this year for 11 p.m.
Around 9:30 p.m., a safety monitor working for the special patrol police remarked that she felt the atmosphere was getting "tense."
At about 10:25 p.m., a crowd of people tipped over the Porta-Potties directly in front of the special police command center at Gold's Gym.
At 10:41 p.m., police dispatch in the gym received the radio call: gunshots were heard in the 2200 block of Market Street. Ten people had been wounded in a shooting, city officials soon learned, two of them critically. The shootings took place near Sullivan's Funeral Home and close to the one music stage that had just begun to shut down for the night. The two most seriously injured victims were transported by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital.
"At one level, we were one gun away from having a reasonably safe evening," Dufty told the Bay Area Reporter shortly before midnight Tuesday. "It's a tragedy. As a leader of this city I'm very aware that there's a climate of young adults and gang-related violence that affects the Bay Area, California, and the nation.
"Right now, my thoughts are with the individuals at SF General. It's my understanding that two people are in life-threatening situations and five are wounded," Dufty added, speaking before the city upped its victim count from seven to 10 on Wednesday, November 1 (nine of them shot, one injured incidentally). At press time, no arrests had been made related to the shootings.
The shootings appeared to be gang-related, said Dufty, and police said they likely could have occurred elsewhere if not in the Castro.
"Anytime people are from all over. . .certain groups don't get along with other groups, and that could happen anywhere," Sergeant Neville Gittens, SFPD spokesman, told the B.A.R. "Unfortunately, people take advantage of a gathering like that to take out their frustrations and anger. It just happened to be there, but it could have been anywhere in the city."
Gittens read to the B.A.R. a statement from SFPD Chief Heather Fong that said, "For most of the evening, virtually all in the crowd were very well behaved, and there were few arrests. Regrettably, a small group of attendees, none of whom were from the Castro, exploited this event, and brought violence to an otherwise spirited but orderly celebration."
There also was at least one stabbing, according to some reports, as well as a sexual assault, fights, and injuries, though generally, such incidents have been par for the course over the last several years. Laura O'Reilly-Jackson, a dispatcher who has worked the event for the past four years, said additional issues on Tuesday included problems getting the ambulance through the large crowds, and people attempting to return to the event after it had ended.
At 1:20 a.m. Wednesday, Dufty said he was on his way over to SFGH to check on the victims, and that the prognosis was good for the most seriously injured woman, who was shot in the head but apparently did not need surgery.
It was the tragic ending to this year's Halloween that all the stakeholders had feared for a variety of reasons. Some people, like Dufty – who advocated for the greater police presence and early closing time – said this year's attempted scale-back was the only way to address what had become a violent and out-of-control event not helped by the more recent city attempts to provide entertainment and a message of safety and fun. Others, like his political opponent Alix Rosenthal, who is running for Dufty's District 8 supervisor seat in next week's election, said that this year's approach – with an early closure and absence of entertainment rather than dedicating more resources to making the event fun – virtually guaranteed increased violence by agitating a young and drunk crowd.
"This plan was a recipe for disaster. It was mismanaged from the very beginning," said Rosenthal, who spent a couple of hours walking the streets with Warner. "The police that I talked to said that the tensions started to run high at about 10:30. . .isn't that about the time the music was turned off?"
Rosenthal also noted that many of the police officers stood with their arms crossed in the perimeters and safety zones of the event, often not interacting with the crowd, as opposed to Warner's safety monitors, who make their way through the crowds as an extra set of eyes and ears. Funding for Warner's safety monitors has been significantly downsized in recent years; at one point employing a team of 80 people on the streets, Warner told the B.A.R. that this year's staff was down to about 20 monitors.
Additionally, reports in the San Francisco Chronicle have questioned whether SFPD's promised weapons checks occurred at all in some areas.
Yet the city also dedicated unprecedented resources to law enforcement and safety personnel this year. There were about 25 percent more police officers on the street this year, and their presence was felt every time a group of young people tried to jump a barricade only to be met by the unexpected blue uniform and ushered back to a more civilized line. Before the shootings, Dufty noted, there were just a handful of arrests, all for public drunkenness.
But at a certain point, the crowds – even at an estimated 20 percent fewer people than last year – just became too much.
"Frankly I don't even believe that 10 percent of the people in the street were from the neighborhood," said Dufty. "I would be hard pressed to think 20 percent even live in San Francisco, and these are the reasons I've been asking whether this event should continue."
There were some festive exchanges between strangers. A small, thin teenage boy dressed in a boxing costume shuffled up the street in a one-two punch dance while a group of costumed girls responded to him by dancing back. A man with a painted face and dressed as a geisha screamed out from his Castro perch, "Hey baby!" to a Japanese woman in a similar costume; she and her family members laughed and waved back. A group of scantily-clad young women made their way up Market Street as a man's girlfriend pushed his head away and playfully scolded the passersby for catching his eye. And that has always been the biggest disappointment of the evening, said Dufty – that just a few incidents had the power to ruin it for the majority of well-behaved individuals.
"I commend the city for really stepping up this year," said Dufty. "Hundreds and hundreds of people worked really hard to make his work. In many respects we were one gun away from that happening. And that vulnerability is what I've been talking about for some time."